A social network generally refers to a group of individuals related to one another based upon some shared value, idea, need, financial exchange, family relation, organization membership, etc. Social networks have existed in various forms in everyday life. With the continued development of the Internet, social networks have migrated into the online world. Examples of social networks include Internet-based and intranet-based bulletin boards or discussion forums. Such sites allow the posting of comments and/or files relating to a subject of common interest to the member users, e.g., the members of the “social network,” community, or organization.
Online social networks allow users to post personal profiles with personal data, shared interests, pictures, music, video, and a variety of other user relevant information. To help organize, categorize, and navigate these large expanses of data, some systems have come to use collaborative tagging. In general, “collaborative tagging” refers to a system in which users associate keywords, known as “tags,” with various objects or references to objects, e.g., data. Each tag can be user-defined and is usually descriptive of some aspect of the object(s) to which the tag is associated. A tag can be viewed as a form of metadata in that each tag provides information about the data to which the tag is associated.
Unlike typical taxonomies used for large digital libraries, the tags used to describe content in a collaborative tagging system are not defined by a rigid classification system. Rather, users may freely create tags and freely associate those tags with objects or references to objects, depending upon the particular type of collaborative tagging system. This results in a “flatter” structure for classifying data. By comparison, a taxonomy is hierarchical in nature. Navigating from one item of information to another within a taxonomy requires traversal of the hierarchy.